Engaged customers as job resources or demands for frontline employees?

Abstract

Purpose -This paper proposes and empirically tests a theoretical model on how different customer engagement behaviors (CEBs), such as giving feedback and helping other customers, affect the role stress-job strain relationship among frontline employees.Design/methodology/approach -Drawing from the job demands-resources model, this paper hypothesizes that some CEBs weaken the role stress-job strain relationship among frontline employees, whereas the opposite holds for other CEBs. To test these hypotheses, the study involved a survey among 279 frontline employees in 20 nursing home teams in Belgium.Findings -The results reveal that the impact of role stress on job strain is stronger when frontline employees notice more helping behaviors among customers and weaker when frontline employees receive more customer feedback or notice that customers spread positive word of mouth about the nursing home.Originality/value -This research contributes to the customer engagement and frontline employee literature by showing that CEBs can act as both job demands and job resources for frontline employees.

Fulfilment of administrative and professional organisational obligations and nurses' customer-oriented behaviours

“…They interact closely, intensively, with patients when delivering the care (Verleye et al . ). Another possible explanation is that we considered administrative as well as professional aspects.…”

“…They interact closely with patients and play a key front‐office role (Verleye et al . ). Therefore, they are of crucial importance to hospitals’ organisational success.…”

“…Registered nurses play a cen-tral important role in health-care organisations. They interact closely with patients and play a key frontoffice role (Verleye et al 2016). Therefore, they are of crucial importance to hospitals' organisational success.…”

What causes imbalance in complex service networks? Evidence from a public health service

“…Similarly, the hospital physician-patient relationship may be affected by actions and institutions of actors in the patient's network, as illustrated by recent evidence that frontline employees (such as hospital physicians) might perceive interactions among customers (such as patients interacting with peers) as job demands (Verleye et al, 2016).…”

Achieving favourable customer outcomes through employee deviance

“…Whereas some work on the psychological background and outcomes of pro-organizational deviance is evident (e.g. Umphress & Bingham, 2011), scant evidence exists on how pro-customer deviance acts on customers' psychological state during service exchanges and also on their consequent behavioural responses towards the employee or the organization (Verleye, Gemmel & Rangarajan, 2015;Deng et al, 2016). Additionally, the role of customer participation in such exchanges is rarely addressed and scarce evidence exists on whether it affects customer 3 responses to employee deviance (Brady et al, 2012).…”